Naphtali Asked to Be Buried in Hebron Before He Ate His Last Meal

There is a way of dying that the tradition holds up as a kind of achievement. Not the spectacular death, not the death in battle or vision or prophecy, but the death that comes in its proper time, with the soul prepared and the house in order and the children around the bed.

Naphtali died this way.

In the hundred and thirty-second year of his life, he invited all his children to a banquet. He feasted with them, drank with them, rejoiced with them in the ordinary abundance of a long life. When morning came, he told them simply: I am dying. His children did not believe him. He was too vigorous, too present, too much himself.

He praised the Holy One and assured them again. The banquet of the day before, he said, had been his last. Then he spoke to them one final time.

The account preserved in Ginzberg's Legends, drawing from the tradition of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, compiled between the second century BCE and the first century CE, shows us a man who had been preparing this moment for years. He had given his children the fear of God as their inheritance. He had warned them about the danger of joining the sons of Joseph instead of the sons of Levi and Judah. He had told them the visions he had seen, the dream of brothers seizing the sun and moon while Joseph remained earthbound, the dream of the ship that wrecked when Joseph refused to listen, and what his father Jacob had made of them: that the two visions were one, and that their meaning pointed toward exile.

He had described the moment when God divided the nations and Abraham chose to follow only the One who spoke the world into being. He had passed on the great principle: do not do to your neighbor what you would not want done to yourself. Fear God and serve Him. Everything else is commentary.

Now, having said all of this, he made his final request.

Carry my remains to Hebron. Bury me there, near my fathers.

The Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, which Abraham had purchased from Ephron the Hittite for four hundred shekels of silver (Genesis 23:16-20), was the first land the family owned in the land of promise. Abraham lay there. Isaac lay there. Rebekah. Leah. Jacob himself, carried up from Egypt by his sons at his own insistence, lay there. To be buried in Hebron was to rejoin the whole arc of the family's covenant with God, to place your bones in the ground that had been purchased with certainty, the one piece of the promised land that was already owned before the promise was fully given.

Naphtali ate and drank with rejoicing. He covered his face. He died.

His sons did according to all their father had commanded them.

The substance of what Naphtali taught in those final hours returns again and again to one question: what does God actually want from us? His children had asked this directly, and he had answered with what he believed was the full answer: not sacrifice, not complex legal observance, but the fear of God expressed in how you treat the person beside you. Do not do to your neighbor what you would not want done to yourself. Serve God. Follow after Him. This is the whole of it.

The tradition notes something about Naphtali's dying that it notes about only a few others: he was healthy of body at the end. Not diminished by long illness, not hollowed out by grief or failure. The full hundred and thirty-two years had not consumed him. He came to his death as a man who had lived well, which in the tradition's understanding means: who had used his body for what it was made for, without excess and without deprivation.

His brother Gad, the ninth son of Jacob, assembled his own sons shortly after Naphtali's death and confessed to them the part he had played in the sale of Joseph, the jealousy and the talebearing that had fed his rage. The brothers were dying one by one, each accounting for himself, each passing to his children the shape of his own experience. Reuben confessed his transgression. Simeon confessed his violence. Dan confessed the murder he had planned. Each deathbed testimony was a kind of excavation, the truth finally released from the pressure of a long life.

Naphtali's accounting was unusual in this: he had no major sin to confess. He had the dreams, the warnings, the love of a God he never wavered from. He had been Jacob's runner all his life, carrying messages too important to entrust to slower feet, and at the end he delivered the last message himself: the fear of God is enough. It has always been enough. Carry me to Hebron when it is done.

They carried him. They buried him with his fathers. The cave received him the way it receives all the patriarchs: without ceremony, without explanation, in the dark under the ground of the first purchased land, waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.